The renaissance of Italy's lesser lights

Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, Tiepolo: these are the stars, the big wheels
in the art of the Italian Renaissance and Baroque.

Most of the punters heading for the Melbourne Museum and National Gallery of
Victoria's blockbuster, The Italians: Three Centuries of Italian art,
will be attracted by the prospect of seeing something famous in the flesh. A Da
Vinci drawing or Caravaggio's sensuous Narcissus.

David Jaffe, however, would like us to take a good look at the other painters
we have never heard of: at Federico Barocci's naturalistic Holy Family,
for example, or Bartolemeo Passerotti's twin portraits of 16th-century Bolognese
street life, The Butcher Stall and The Fish Stall.

Do that, he says, and ``any visitor will be taken down alleys and pathways
they never expected''.

Jaffe, a former curator of European art at the National Gallery in Canberra,
is now senior curator at the National Gallery in London. His speciality is the
Italian Renaissance. ``This selection has been made by Italians,'' he says,
``and they understand the regional complexities.''

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Italian art and patronage, he explains, revolved around city-states; indeed,
Italians still define themselves as Neopolitan or Roman rather than Italian. Art
history has been dominated by Florence and Venice, but there were extraordinary
painters everywhere in the 16th and 17th centuries, most of them holding to a
regional aesthetic.

``In Bologna you're talking about lights and darks and a sort of squidginess,
but in Genoa you get a frothiness, with whites that look almost like
milkshakes.''

So that while we tend to associate the baroque with swirling draperies,
dramatic shadows and zooming perspectives, the broad sweep of Italian art shows
how many Italian artists were just as interested in landscapes, still lives and
real people, subjects now packaged as essentially Dutch or Flemish. Not
everything was exaggerated.

``No, realism was extremely important to them,'' says Jaffe, ``whether it was
feeling the pain of Christ or the mourning of the Virgin. That was something
essential for artists to address and capture.''

Artists of the 17th century, he points out, were surrounded by scientific
breakthroughs in optics that were the equal of anything the Impressionists
faced. New telescopes could bring the stars close to earth; microscopes made the
true nature of familiar objects visible. ``The whole world was being reassessed
and I think this led to divergent ways of trying to capture reality.''

Artists capturing a scene, he says, wanted to convey ``an instantaneous sense
of being there''.

And so the angel turns, startled, to catch our eye at Barocci's stable door,
while you can check the quality of the marbling on Passerotti's butcher's wares.
``You can see the haggling over a good buy, too, even pick up this habit of
eating small birds and tortoises from this painting that are still part of the
diet of some regions of Italy. You can get the whole atmosphere.''

Italian artists, employed by the courts of city states, Popes, pious donors
and churches, also spoke directly to the crisis of Catholic confidence that
followed the Reformation.

``The Council of Trent was perhaps the biggest attempt to reform what had
been, until Martin Luther banged up his tenets on the church door, the universal
church,'' says Jaffe. ``That demanded an art that was less beautiful and more
inclined to induce piety in the viewer. That really had a big influence on a
number of painters. Givan Moroni, who is beautifully represented in this
exhibition by one of the finest portraits of the 16th century, the so-called
Knight in Rose Breeches -although you might not have heard of him - actually
went to Trent himself. He realised it was a good way of getting
commissions.''

Increasingly, painting itself was caught somewhere between a glamour
profession and a craft. Fame, as now, was as much a result of artists'
self-promotion and attitude as talent. Guido Reni, one of the Baroque's high
fliers, really knew how to sell himself, Jaffe says. ``He kept saying there are
lots of painters and they get paid a certain amount, but I am a supreme genius
and worth 10 times as much. And he managed to pull this off.''

By contrast, Il Guercino (``the squinter'') of Bologna was, Jaffe says, a
good painter, but was sidelined because he still treated art as a craft: his
accounts books show that he charged for paintings according to the number of
heads they included.

Guido Cagnacci, whose luminous Allegory of Human Life is one of the
show's highlights, might have earned a bigger splash if he had not disgraced
himself by trying to cheat a widowed noblewoman.

``This had a big influence on where he was allowed to go after that,'' says
Jaffe. Big church commissions, for example, were out of the question. ``He
became an itinerant. He worked in a wide circle of places, but actually
perfected a private art - very sensuous depictions of women - for people's
studies.'' It is in the careers and innovations of these more minor painters
that the story of Italian art, with all its upheavals, rivalries and pushes and
pulls of influence, is really told. Art, like anything else, is subject to
fashion; even Caravaggio has had his time in the shade. But that is
changing.

``We empathise more now,'' says Jaffe. ``We look at work in context.'' And
two, three, four centuries on, the painters are still speaking.

The Italians: Three Centuries of Italian Art opens at the Melbourne
Museum on July 5.